


Causes and Effects

by Vigs



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Abortion, F/M, Past relationship: Four/Sarah Jane, mentions GITF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-04-09 04:21:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4333673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vigs/pseuds/Vigs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If she had asked the Doctor, he probably could have given her a method much more advanced and less messy than peeing on a stick. But that would have involved talking about that night, and that wasn’t something they did." This is NOT babyfic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Causes and Effects

**Author's Note:**

> There's a lot of fanfiction out there where Rose unexpectedly gets pregnant, and she and the Doctor are brought together by the decision to keep the baby. I don't think that's the only possible outcome.

If she had asked the Doctor, he probably could have given her a method much more advanced and less messy than peeing on a stick. But that would have involved talking about that night, and that wasn’t something they did.  
  
His advanced method probably wouldn’t have taken as long, either. She had to sit and wait to find out whether she was...you know...whether it was positive, or whether she’d just lost track of when her period was supposed to be, and also caught a stomach bug. It wasn’t like losing track was particularly difficult when you lived in a time machine. She had a hell of a time trying to take the Pill at the same time every day, too…which was why there was a possibility that the test was going to come out positive.  
  
Seducing the Doctor had seemed like such a good idea at the time. It’d been the night after they left Sarah Jane behind, not at all coincidentally, since it was a conversation with Sarah that had put the idea in Rose’s head to begin with.  
  
_Does he still stroke bits of the TARDIS?_  
  
_Yeah! Yeah! He does! I’m like, “Do you two wanna be alone?” And then sometimes I’m doing the simplest thing, something I’ve done a thousand times before, and he starts giving me detailed instructions on how to do it! Like I don’t know._  
  
_Oh, god, he doesn’t still do that in bed, does he?_  
  
_...what?_  
  
_Where he’ll be giving a lecture on everything he’s doing to you as he’s doing it, and why it...feels...wait, are you not…?_  
  
The Doctor had come in then, and they’d quickly become rather occupied with foiling the Krillitane, but the conversation had certainly made an impression. Rose had thought he didn’t do that, or didn’t do it with humans, or with women, or with people who were traveling with him, or something.  
  
But he did it with Sarah Jane, so he could damn well do it with her, too.  
  
That had been the litany she repeated in her head to psych herself up to knocking on his door, clad only in a short, silky bathrobe. In the end, she never had knocked; he’d come and opened the door, still in his regular suit, and stood aside silently to let her in.  
  
The entire event had been silent, in fact, or at least wordless. He’d responded gratifyingly to her every kiss and touch, but he didn’t initiate anything and he didn’t say a word. In the end, because she knew he was unlikely to sleep and she didn’t want to be in his way, she went back to her own room. The next day, there had been France, and Reinette, and she had decided that despite a whole hell of a lot of attraction, sex with the Doctor needed to be a one-time thing. He’d never tried to initiate anything or even bring it up.  
  
And now...the timer she’d set on her phone was going off, and it was time to look at the results.  
  
Positive.  
  
She walked down the corridor to the console room feeling like she was walking towards a firing squad rather than her best friend.  
  
“Hello, Rose! Feeling better?” the Doctor asked when she stepped out. “Fancy a concert? I could go for a good concert, what about you? What’ve you got there?”  
  
“Doctor.” Her voice caught in her throat, and the Doctor looked up sharply from whatever he was doing to the console with a mallet.  
  
“Rose? What’s wrong?”  
  
She wordlessly held out the pregnancy test for his inspection.  
  
“...oh.” He regarded her solemnly, then wrapped her in a hug. “I’m so sorry, Rose. We can’t go back, but there might be a way to get a message to him, if I can figure out a strong enough power source. But that’s all.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I didn’t mention it before because I wasn’t sure it would do much good, but if it would help, I’ll figure it out.” He put his hands on her shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “Anything I can do to help, Rose, just say the word.”  
  
“What are you talking about, Doctor? Get a message to who?”  
  
“To Mickey. This must be from when he was on board, right? Timing works out. Hm, not sure what sort of effect conception on a TARDIS might have on a human fetus…”  
  
“Doctor. I didn’t have sex with Mickey on the TARDIS.”  
  
“Ah, well, that’s one less thing to worry about, then. Hm, I could see if the Time Agency has any files on the effects of time travel on a pregnancy, although I’m sure it’s much worse with a vortex manipulator than--”  
  
“I think the fact that it’s half Time Lord is probably going to be a little more important than that, don’t you?”  
  
The Doctor gaped at her.  
  
“What?”  
  
“It’s not Mickey’s. I haven’t had sex with Mickey since I got on the TARDIS the first time. There’s only one person it could’ve been, and that’s you.”  
  
“What!?”  
  
“I know we never talked about it, but you can’t tell me you don’t remember!”  
  
“No, no, of course not, but it couldn’t possibly be mine. Time Lords are sterile! Have been ever since…” His face turned white. “Rose, stay right here, I’ll be back in a tick.”  
  
He dashed off down the corridor, and Rose sank into the seat with her head in her hands.  
  
She didn’t want to be a mum. Maybe someday, five or ten years down the line--maybe. But definitely not now! She’d had maybe a year and a half of glorious freedom, of feeling like she was completely in control of her life, and maybe it was selfish, but she wasn’t ready to give that up. Not yet.  
  
But how could she tell the Doctor that she didn’t want to carry the next Time Lord? That was so much bigger than just her preferences.  
  
Maybe...maybe once she’d given birth (and she shuddered at the idea of pregnancy and childbirth, but she’d be willing to go through worse for the Doctor) they could leave the baby with her mother for half an hour and come back in five or ten years, when she was ready to be a mum.  
  
Of course, knowing the Doctor’s driving, they’d probably end up coming back to find a ten-year-old kid and an absolutely furious Jackie Tyler.  
  
A kid. A baby. A person. A half-alien person, growing inside her right now, because of her carelessness. Rose wanted to throw up for more reasons than morning sickness.  
  
The Doctor still hadn’t come back. He’d told her to stay put, but she wasn’t about to start following his instructions just because she was pregnant, so she went to look for him.  
  
Apparently the TARDIS was on her side, because the first door she opened revealed the med bay. The Doctor was sitting beside the scanner in the same position she had, head in hands.  
  
“Doctor?”  
  
“Time Lords have been sterile for a very long time,” he said without moving. “We reproduced artificially. But apparently the curse--er, the effect that made us unable to reproduce without external assistance--ended with the destruction of Gallifrey. I hadn’t thought to check until now.”  
  
“I’m on the Pill,” Rose said, sitting down beside him. “But it’s hard, trying to take it at the same time every day on the TARDIS. And I sort of thought, with you being an alien…”  
  
“The backlash from the curse breaking seems to have supercharged things, so to speak.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes.  
  
“Oh.” Rose swallowed. She was going to need to put her personal feelings aside and be the practical one here. “So...do we need to go back to France and make sure there’s no, um, consequences there?”  
  
That made him look up at her, startled.  
  
“What?” he asked.  
  
“Reinette, Doctor. Do we need to make sure she didn’t have a...a Time Baby?”  
  
“What?” His forehead wrinkled. “I didn’t have sex with Reinette, Rose.”  
  
“Oh. Well, that’s good. One thing at a time, and all.” Now wasn’t the time for feelings about that either, not while he was shutting down like this.  
  
He turned away from her silently, putting his head back into his hands.  
  
“Should we check and find out if it’s...viable, and all? Can a half-human half-Time Lord even exist?”  
  
“Theoretically,” he said, his voice muffled. “But there wouldn’t be much I could tell at this stage, Rose. It’s basically just a clump of cells at the moment.”  
  
“Right.” She looked down at her own clasped hands. “What are we going to do, Doctor?”  
  
“I can’t tell you what to do with your body.” His words came out in a rush, like he’d been going over them in his head.  
  
“Okay, but...I don’t know, Doctor. I mean, can you imagine us as parents?” She laughed hollowly. “My mum is going to flip.”  
  
“I was a dad, once.”  
  
Of course he was. And of course he’d lost his children.  
  
“I can try,” Rose said, her voice wavering. “I’m sure I’ll be rubbish at it, but I’ll try to be your child’s mum, if that’s what you want. You can be a dad again.”  
  
He stood up abruptly and took a few steps away, and stood there with his hands in his pockets, facing away from her.  
  
“I can’t be a dad again. Rose, don’t you understand? I killed them. All the Time Lords, my family included. I killed my own children to end the war.” She hadn’t heard his voice sound so despairing since he’d worn another face. “My children, and their children. I loved them, but I left, and I barely ever saw them, and then I killed them. I won’t abandon you and I won’t force you, but I can’t be a dad again, not now, maybe not ever.”  
  
Rose got up and walked over to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but he flinched away from her touch.  
  
“So let’s end it, then,” she said softly. “I don’t want to be a mum, Doctor. I just want to go on like we have.”  
  
“If I make you end it, you’ll hate me,” he said, his voice raw.  
  
“I thought you’d want me to keep it, Doctor. So you wouldn’t be the last of your kind any more, and all. I was willing to try, for your sake, but I’m twenty! I’m twenty and I run for my life every day and eat weird alien food and almost die on a regular basis and I love it. I don’t want to end that.”  
  
“You’re sure?” he asked, finally meeting her eyes.  
  
“Positive. Maybe I’m selfish, but I think that living how I want to live is more important than a little clump of cells.” She smiled up at him, feeling the weight that had been on her since she saw the result on the test begin to dissipate.  
  
He wrapped her in a rib-squeezing hug, and she hugged him back as hard as she could for a long moment before he sprang away to root through the cabinets around the room.  
  
“I’m sure I have something here that’ll take care of it. Haven’t had much call for it in, well, ever, but it’s important to be ready for anything...aha! Here we are.” He handed her a little white pill. “Take that and you’ll have a slightly heavier period than usual, possibly with more cramping than is normal for you. And that’ll be the end of it. Don’t even have to tell Jackie. Well, unless you want to. Your decision, of course. And so is taking the pill. You can change your mind, you know.”  
  
“Not a chance,” she said, and gulped the pill down dry.  
  
“Well, you can still change your mind, if it comes to that,” he said, grinning and prattling in a way that was incredibly comforting. “There’s still a narrow margin of time when I could induce vomiting and get rid of it that way. Or I suppose even after that, we could put together a replacement blastocyst. Not...not the same way, necessarily, unless you wanted to. Although personally I’d prefer to take some precautions against that sort of thing happening again, if we were to do that again.”  
  
“Is that likely to happen?” Rose asked, nibbling on the corner of her lip. “Us together again, I mean.”  
  
“Well, that’s hardly up to me, is it?” he asked.  
  
“What? Of course it is,” she said, confused.  
  
“Well, obviously I’m interested, but you live in my home and you spend most of your time years or parsecs away from your home with no way to get back without me. I can’t take advantage of that.”  
  
“Are you serious?” she asked. “Doctor, I didn’t think you even did that sort of thing until Sarah Jane told me that you two had been together! And then you didn’t say a thing when we, you know, and the next day you were mooning over Reinette, so I thought it didn’t mean anything to you.”  
  
“You mean everything to me, Rose,” he said, and she couldn’t help but kiss him.


End file.
